Archive for the ‘Photo’ Category

The next time you wish to take a random photoshoot with one of these phones, do make a note that they are Arduino powered! The makers Chris Bell, Liangjie Xia, and Mike Kelberman built the Rotobooth as part of Twilio’s Photohack Day 2 event designed to showcase Twilio’s cloud computing capabilities.

When users lift the handset and dial their digits, an Arduino (you just knew there’d be one involved didn’t you?) takes in the information and then initiates the camera.

Four photos are taken — just like a photo booth — and they are sent to a Mac Mini. The photos are resized, watermarked and uploaded to Flickr. The photo links are then texted to your phone using Twilio.

If you decide not to enter your number just dial “0” and one photo is taken and is uploaded to Rotobooth.com

Now just dial your number on the Rotobooth’s rotary dial and once your photo is taken, the shot is uploaded to Flickr and you are texted with the link.

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

Some time ago I bought a RICOH GR III camera. Since I didn’t want to pay the amount for the CA-1 remote, I did a little research how this thing works. Soon I came up with Muttyan’s home page. This gives a detailed description of the CA-1’s internals and how it works. Good job, there you’ll find everything you need!

Basically a button half press, a full press and a release are signaled with three different patterns to the camera via its USB connection. No “real” USB protocol is used, just pulsing the USB +5V supply line. Emulating these pulses is an easy job with an Arduino board, so I did a quick proof of concept.

Some time ago I headed in one of the most complete DIY photo/cinema solutions for low-budget productions, the OpenMoco. It seems they spent some time in prototyping a brand new shield:

The DollyShield is an adaptation of the Arduino Motor Shield v3 that provides directional PWM control of two DC motors, at up to 1A of current each. In addition to the motor drivers, it also provides a stereo plug with dual opto-coupled outputs for direct camera control, a 2×16 LCD, five user input buttons, and four auxilliary inputs or outputs through two stereo jacks. It is designed to provide an inexpensive and easy-to-use interface for two-axis motion control integrated with a camera.

I’m starting new series of articles describing exciting field of digital camera control. In modern cameras, USB port can be used not only for transferring images to a PC, but also for sending control commands to the camera. It is often possible to send commands which “press” the shutter button, modify shutter and aperture values, some cameras are even capable of doing focus control. At the same time, new shooting techniques, such as HDR and stacked focus, require that a photographer makes several shots, slightly modifying one or several shooting parameters from shot to shot. Even age-old time lapse technique could use some automation. Since camera manufacturers are, as always slow to implement there cool features, Arduino comes to the rescue.